Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited)

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Project last summer, with a slew of complementary exhibitions and performances; and Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited), which premiered last spring in New York, is on a nationwide tour with a stop at Power Center Friday and Saturday, February 7 and 8.

Clarke began her dance career with the acrobatic modern dance group Pilobolus in 1973 and subsequently developed her own brand of visionary dance-theater fusions with French choreographer Felix Blaska for their company, Crowsnest. The original Vienna: Lusthaus — conceived, choreographed, and directed by Clarke — was produced in 1986.

With music by Richard Peaslee and text by Charles L. Mee, Vienna, according to program notes, explores "the unconscious world from which our tormented waking world springs eternally." This is a society in which each daily encounter is fraught with the collective concerns of dreams and discrimination, fantasy and impending war. Throughout its eighty-five minutes (performed without intermission), Vienna distills the decadence of bourgeois Viennese society at the dawn of the twentieth century with artistic economy and well-chosen signifiers.